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"This is a big first, because astronomers have been wanting to look at the collision of two neutron stars for decades, but have never been able to find one in sufficient time to look at it. We found the source, and passed it on to astronomy partners all over the world."

Within hours, thousands of astronomers across the world were searching the sky.

Dr Christian Wolf, from the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, said it was a moment scientists had been waiting for, but hadn't expected just yet.

An undated handout photo made available by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) shows an image from the VIMOS instrument in Chile shows the galaxy NGC 4993, about 130 million light-years from Earth. (AAP)

"An alert went out in the middle of the night while I was in bed and my phone was on silent. My youngest team member rang my doorbell at 2 in the morning and when I saw him, I knew this was going to be something exciting," Dr Wolf said.

"It was an exciting moment, it was incredible"

His team used telescopes to search the sky in the hours and days after the collision, and were able to spot light from a fireball, blasting into space.

"It was the first telescope to report the colour of the fireball, which indicates the temperature of the fireball was about 6000 degrees Celsius - roughly the surface temperature of the Sun".

The detection is a significant event, because it will help scientists unravel mysteries of the universe.

An undated handout photo made available by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) shows an artist's impression of two tiny but very dense neutron stars at the point at which they merge and explode as a kilonova.

"Neutron stars are stars which are extreme matter, they're the highest density material we have in the universe," Prof. Scott said.

"If we can understand them, we're going to get a lot of new physics coming from that."

"These are our laboratories in space...we'll be looking to understand many other things about the universe, supernova, cosmic strings, pulsars - but we want to look back to almost the beginning of time, with gravitational waves."

Researchers are already learning from the information received, and they believe it will help them confirm that neutron star collisions created all the gold in the universe.

"We expected these collisions would be power houses, production factories for heavy elements, and heavy precious metals like gold and platinum," Prof. Scott says.

An undated handout graphic, made available in February 2016 by NASA / CALTECH-JPL, showing an artist's impression of gravitational waves generated by binary neutron stars. (AAP)

"So far what we're seeing in the data is the models of that being these case holding up quite well. So things like gold rings are probably produced in neutron star mergers."

The scientists will spend the next year analysing the information from the detection.

"Ultimately, we'll be looking to understand many other things about the universe, supernova, cosmic strings, pulsars - but we want to look back to almost the beginning of time with gravitational waves, and understand the early universe," Prof. Scott says.

It's hoped in the future, scientists will be able to see even further into the universe.

A view during a press conference of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Garching near Munich, Bavaria, Germany. (AAP)

Staff and students at ANU's Research School of Physics and Engineering are now developing new technologies to help gravitational wave detectors search twice as far.

"We will make the largest optical sensors ever built even more powerful," Professor David McClelland said.

"We will then detect many more gravitational waves from cataclysmic events in space, involving black holes, neutron stars and things not yet known. All of this paints an incredibly bright future for the field."